We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The Introduction provides an overview of the book’s thirteen chapters, outlining its main goal: to explain the basic notions of prehistoric archeology and its important role in helping us to gain a better understanding of the modern-day human condition. The structure of the book is exposed in five main parts. The first part (Chapters 1 and 2) defines prehistoric archeology and the different fields of knowledge integrated into its multidisciplinary scope. The second part (Chapters 3 through 5) explores the evolutionary indicators of what it means to be human, providing a concise geographical and chronological framework using examples from the archeology. The third part (Chapters 6 and 7) focuses on the technosocial evolutionary processes leading up to Homo sapiens, the last surviving hominin on the planet. The fourth part (Chapters 8 through 12) applies the concepts explained in the previous chapters to consider how the most challenging issues facing modern humanity today are elucidated by viewing them through the lens of prehistoric archeology. The fifth and final part (Chapter 13) concludes the book with a lucid interpretation of the significant role played by prehistoric archeology and evolutionary theory in the modern world.
In this article I discuss the surprising similarity between the interpretation of the story told in chapter 3 of Genesis put forward in several of his novels by Sebastian Faulks and my own interpretation set out in my book, The Fall and the Ascent of Man: How Genesis Supports Darwin. Faulks and I argue that Genesis 3 is about hominization, the achievement of human status by a proto-human couple by the acquisition of self-awareness. However, that is where the similarity ends. I consider Faulks's understanding of self-awareness to be seriously mistaken, reductive and incoherent, and I take issue with what I consider to be the consequences of this mistaken understanding.
This chapter describes the origins of the modern, Western study of language, belief, and knowledge. "Europe" refers to the continent, itself with fuzzy boundaries, but when appearing in the world history of knowledge "European" usually refers also to the places most colonized by Europeans in the last two centuries, and to those places' peoples and their ideas. The chapter discusses how historians and others have treated four key moments in the history of knowledge and belief, and specifically at what role the Wider World plays in their scholarship. The four inflection points are familiar: hominization, the Axial Age of religious development, the European Scientific Revolution, and recent and continuing secularization. The secularization thesis was formed in a European scholarly milieu, based on ideas about contemporary and past Christianity, and only then expanded to the Wider World. The Wider World reinforces the secularization thesis, begs questions of the Scientific Revolution, and delights in the level playing field of the Axial Age.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.